Since I posted this, I have installed several distros. In no particular order:
1. Mint 22 with Cinnamon
2. Mint 22 with KDE
3. Fedora with Gnome
4. Fedora with KDE
5. Fedora Everything with KDE (okay, technically, this is the same as #4 but see below).
6. Arch with KDE
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These have been installed on an early 2014 MacBook Air except for #1. It's installed on an early 2015 MacBook Air and is my Linux baseline (my main computer is still running macOS 15.1.1).
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Fedora Everything with KDE is currently running on my 2014 MBA.
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As I think most on this group would say and, in fact, what I have found to be true except for a niche of users, use what you will enjoy. Here's what I have found:
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All have their little quirks... For example, on both Fedora and Arch, I had to find and install the Broadcom wireless drivers for the built-in wireless card on my MBA. Having a USB wireless NIC is a necessity if installing one of these distros on a MBA. After having done this a few times, this is a trivial task. For Mint, the driver is included with the ISO but you still have to enable it. It isn't enabled by default.
As for DEs, I like the look of KDE but not the bloat; hence, Fedora Everything - you pick what you want. However, not knowing what everything is, I still wound up with stuff I didn't want. I realize I can remove it. Installing KDE on Arch gave me a minimalist KDE install which I liked.
I'll say this, if you like running a dark or "twilight" DE, Linux DEs get this way better than either macOS or Windows. I don't have enough choice for contrast with either macOS or Windows but, just wow! I can tweak my Linux DE just the way I like it.
I like the running release philosophy of Arch. Install that using btrfs (if I my minimal understanding of btrfs is accurate) and I think you have a pretty good system if you can get past the initial install / configuration.
I did run into a couple of issues in Arch that I couldn't easily resolve - printing to my network printer and I installed JS8Call before any FT-mode software. I am going to revisit both now that I've realized I have a second SSD I can use for Arch.
I know better than installing JS8Call before WSJTX on my Mac so I should have known this about Linux - that's my fault. When I tried to fix it by removing JS8Call, I had several debug files that stopped the WSJTX install. When I tried to remove them or rename them, they were rw locked and I wanted to test something else anyway.
While I'm more familiar with apt, I like pacman and dnf (in that order) much better. I just learned to search pacman (and yay for AUR) when playing with Arch. This carried over to dnf when I started playing with Fedora. I am sure there are similar switches with apt but I wasn't forced to learn them.
One thing I have *not* played with is a tiling manager. I've only ever played with floating Windows GUIs but I usually wind up "tiling" them anyway so I really want to try one. It seems as though there are a lot of videos about Hyprland but I know there are others.
I *really* like the ability to "roll-my-own" when it comes to Linux. While I much prefer macOS over Windows, that ability really isn't easy in either of those OSs.
Regardless, this has been a fun journey and I was finally able to try Arch (I've tried in the past and failed). If you've ever wanted to try Arch, find "Bread on Penguins" on YouTube. She has a video that's almost an hour long that goes through the installation of Arch. She has a follow-up video on installing a DE.
Joel, W4JBB
Joel Black - W4JBB